Rebecca Brown has written 12 books. Her novel, The Gifts of the Body, is one of the best and saddest books we’ve ever read. It won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction in 1995.
This is Ruth’s introduction to our November pick, The Terrible Girls. A few weeks ago at a dinner party I (Ruth) accidentally started an argument with a stranger over Mortals, a novel by Norman Rush, which I confessed to “hate-reading.” Jonathan (the stranger) happens to be a Norman Rush expert—this sort of bad luck is mine and mine alone, I feel—and so I found myself in the awkward position of having to logically and instantly defend an opinion I had formed slowly and emotionally. Mortals (spoiler alert!) is about the dissolution of a long, loving, and—it grosses me out to type this, but it’s a central concern—sexually satisfying marriage.
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